This paper seeks to consider the influence of Ann Radcliffe’s
fiction on the literary scene at the end of the eighteenth century.
It will examine two very different responses to the Radcliffean paradigm,
through a study of three aspects of her variety of Gothic as developed by
Jane Austen and Regina Maria Roche. By contrasting the reactions of
these authors to divergent strains which exist within her work, the legacy
that Radcliffe bequeathed her contemporaries might be observed in the writings
of other significant authors from the Romantic period. As a consequence
of this, it might also become clearer how Austen’s own parodic stance can
be seen operating within the limits set by the structures of Radcliffe’s
romances.

No
better example of Radcliffean Gothic exists than the immensely popular Mysteries
of Udolpho, the novel having gone through four editions and numerous
impressions between 1794 and 1799. As well as Austen’s only ‘Gothic’ text,
against Udolpho one can compare a comparably popular work by Regina
Maria Roche: Clermont, which was published by the avatar of populist
literature, the Minerva Press. Clermont is, in fact, one of
the seven ‘horrid novels’ mentioned by Isabella Thorpe to Catherine Morland
early in Northanger Abbey.[1] Roughly speaking, both Clermont
and Northanger Abbey were written contemporaneously, presenting comparable
instances of eighteenth-century reactions to Radcliffe. Clermont
was published in 1798 as Roche’s fourth novel, in the wake of her previous
work, the successful Children of the Abbey (1796). Although
Roche has since fallen into relative obscurity, Devendra Varma notes that
she and Radcliffe ‘were the rival female novelists of the latter part of
the eighteenth and commencement of the nineteenth century’.[2] Austen’s
novel presents a less straightforward example, owing to the vicissitudes
of its publishing history. The various critical accounts of the composition
of Northanger Abbey settle on a date of between 1794 and 1798, with
the Gothic elements most likely inserted in 1798.[3] Austen sold it
for publication under the title ‘Susan’ to Crosby and Co in 1803, but it
was not issued until 1818, posthumously published with Persuasion,
and two years after she had bought back the copyright. Northanger
Abbey has been considered Austen’s most immature and least unified work,
many critics noting an inherent contradiction between its two volumes.
There are, however, many aspects of the novel which demonstrate Austen’s
intelligent appreciation of contemporary literature and her ability to take
its conventions and reinscribe them in her idiosyncratic form.

THE
GOTHIC HEROINE
Marilyn Butler notes that ‘[t]he capacity to feel was presented as the transcendent
merit of every sentimental heroine from Julie to Delphine, enough in itself
to lift them above the common run of mortals’.[4] The Radcliffean
protagonist is essentially a sentimental heroine caught in a nightmare world
which tests her virtues to their limit. However, if she is graced
with abundant virtues, then the Rochean heroine is yet more perfect, and
as a consequence even more static. Of Madeline, Clermont’s
heroine, we are told,

her perfect knowledge of the historian’s record, and just
conception of the poet’s beauty, rendered her a companion well qualified
to diversify [her father’s] lonely hours. … She was tall and delicately
made; nor was the symmetry of her features inferior to that of her bodily
form … (p. 5)

In the course of her misadventures, Udolpho’s protagonist,
Emily St Aubert, learns to balance the imaginative sensibilities which lead
her to terrifying extremes with a rational awareness of the outside world,
while Madeline’s sensibilities are valorised without qualification.[5]
Radcliffe simultaneously celebrates the heroine’s sensibilities and warns
of the dangers they can cause. The essential difference between Udolpho
and Clermont is that the sentimental preponderances of the Rochean
heroine are not perceived to be dangerous or excessive in any way.
The imagined horrors which Madeline conjures up are soon followed by realities
which verify them; whereas in Udolpho, Emily receives from the first
admonishment from her father:

‘Those, who really possess sensibility, ought early to be
taught, that it is a dangerous quality … beware of priding yourself on the
gracefulness of sensibility … Always remember how much more valuable is
the strength of fortitude, than the grace of sensibility.’ (pp. 80–1)

In fact, Madeline’s fatherthe eponymous Clermontis
as much an agent of sentimentalism as his daughter. Throughout Udolpho,
Emily calls upon ‘fortitude’ to overcome the terrors engendered by her sensibilities,
and her whole Gothic journey militates towards the realisation that her
sensitive imagination is responsible for much of her terror, and her recognition
of ‘all the precepts, which she had received from her deceased father, on
the subject of self-command … on this most severe occasion of her life’
(p. 518). Madeline, however, undergoes no such transformation, and,
as Natalie Schroeder notes, remains preserved in her perfection: ‘Mrs Roche
… as novelist, makes no critical reflections on Madeline’s emotional distress’.[6]
Roche’s answer to the Radcliffean paradigm is to neglect the dangers to
which sensibility can lead, and instead to celebrate only the gifted intuitiveness
of the sentimental heroine. Despite these differences, the overwhelming
impression given by Radcliffe’s Gothic fiction is that virtuous sensibility
is the only source of happiness, is its own reward, and may indeed received
reward in this world as well as in the next.

Writing from an antithetical
position to Roche, Austen assumes the critical stance inherent in Radcliffean
Gothic, emphasising the chimerical nature of sensibility. Daniel Cottom
argues that ‘[a]n accurate reading of Austen demands that fewer assumptions
be made about her personal psychology and more attention paid to the disguises,
silences, and submissions demanded by the society she portrayed in her novels’.[7]
Northanger’s heroine, Catherine Morland, is a notorious example of
the ‘female Quixote’, the heroine whose perceptions of the world are shaped
by the literature she reads. Catherine, however, is far from the sentimental
heroine she aspires to be:

She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour,
dark lank hair, and strong features;so much for her person;and
not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of
all boys’ plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but
to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a
canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush. … She never could learn or understand
any thing before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was
often inattentive, and occasionally stupid. (p. 13)

From the start, Austen establishes Catherine Morland as an
antitype to the sentimental heroine. The adolescent Catherine begins
to become interested in sensibility, however, as an arbitrary part of the
maturing process of a young eighteenth-century woman, learned from reading
certain kinds of books. Hence, Austen defines sentimentalism as a
pose rather than nature. During the eighteenth century, sensibility
was seen by many as the correct expression of femininity, but Austen attempts
to prove it as a limiting fiction imposed upon women, and open to abuse.
The exemplar of this potential is the conceited social-climber Isabella
Thorpe, who uses the language of sentimental excess to mask her shallowness.
Sentimental language is used when Austen describes the nascent friendship
between Catherine and Isabella: ‘They called each other by their Christian
name, were always arm in arm when they walked, pinned up each other’s train
for the dance, and were not to be divided in the set …’ (p. 33). Isabella’s
actions, however, belie her words; such as, for instance, when she ignores
Catherine for her flirtation with Catherine’s brother: ‘James and Isabella
were so much engaged in conversing together, that the latter had no leisure
to bestow more on her friend than one smile, one squeeze, and one dearest
Catherine  (p. 54). A speedy engagement with James
follows, and is severed as quickly, when Isabella attempts to appropriate
the more prosperous Captain Tilney, and failing to do so, imputes her treatment
of James to a great misunderstanding. Isabella’s code of propriety,
her own and others’, is drawn from sentimental literature, and disregards
the social conventions of the real world. Austen’s criticism of such
excess is most explicit in her description of the first acquaintance between
Catherine and Eleanor Tilney:

in all probability not an observation was made, nor an expression
used by either which had not been made and used some thousand oftimes before,
under that roof, in every Bath season, yet the merit of their being spoken
with simplicity and truth, and without personal conceit, might be something
uncommon. (p. 66)

However, mundane such a meeting might be, it is ‘uncommon’
because, unlike Isabella’s behaviour, it does not seek to aggrandise the
ego through reflections of the self in others (the sudden intimacy of ‘kindred
spirits’), but is the real attempt of two people to converse socially.
This philosophy is endorsed by the fact that it is Eleanor who proves to
be Catherine’s true friend, while Isabella merely serves her with the established
platitudes learned from fiction and detached from reality. Whereas
the Radcliffean heroine requires ‘fortitude’ to overcome her sentimental
excesses, Austen replaces fictional poses, such as sensibility, with a social
propriety which itself becomes the correct definition of ‘femininity’.

TWO
TYPES OF EVILAusten and Roche once again polarise the divergent aspects which
inhere in Radcliffe’s presentation of the Gothic villain. Clermont
is populated by a plethora of villains and sub-villains, but the most evil
are the D’Alemberts, father and son. Madeline’s first sight of the
younger D’Alembert is as he stands over the bleeding body of the Countess
de Merville, his mother-in-law and her benefactress, having attempted to
assassinate herhowever, at this stage his face is obscured, so he
remains unrecognised to both heroine and reader. After the Countess
dies, Madeline is unprotected and vulnerable to the typical threats made
by the Gothic villain. D’Alembert’s wife, the late Countess’s daughter,
tries to prevent him from raping Madeline by hiding her. The shared
identity of the murderer and the husband is kept a secret until the very
end of the novel when he has finally succeeded in kidnapping Madeline in
order to marry her for lust and fiscal gain:

The most violent rage took possession of D’Alembert
… but the terror which his rage inspired, was trifling to the shock which
Madeline received, when in his inflamed countenance she traced the dreadful
countenance of him beneath whose poiniard she had trembled at midnight in
the ruined monastery of Valdore. (p. 342)

In the retrospective strand of Clermont (another Radcliffean
device), the narrative looks back to the dark past of the previous generation,
and we discover the link between Clermont and D’Alembert père.
He leads the young Clermont to attempt the murder of his half-brother.
His motives, again are typical of the Gothic villain: Clermont's brother
is heir to the estates of D’Alembert père’s uncle, and must
be disposed of for D’Alembert to inherit the money to pay the debts of his
dissipation. Clermont is led to believe that he has murdered his brother,
although this is not the case, and he flees. When Clermont resurfaces
many years later (in the novel’s present) at his father’s house, D’Alembert
threatens to reveal his ‘crime’ unless he allows Madeline to wed his son.
When Madeline first perceives him, ‘she saw, or fancied she saw (which had
just the same effect upon her mind), in his countenance a dissatisfaction
that denoted his not feeling what he professed’ (p. 270). Within four
pages, he has already proposed union between Madeline and his son, been
refused, and flies into a violent rage with her, ‘grasping her hand, and
looking at her with a fiend-like countenance’ (p. 274). Whereas Radcliffe’s
Montoni is essentially a bandit whose evil is exaggerated by Emily’s
fervid imagination, the D’Alemberts come closer to the horror-Gothic conception
of villainy, as depicted in M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Charles
Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Once again, Roche’s
response is to polarise the Radcliffean figures of her novel. Montoni
is strangely attractive to Emily’s eye, rising above his peers by sheer
force of charisma: ‘Delighting in the tumult and in the struggles of life,
he was equally a stranger to pity and fear; his very courage was a sort
of animal ferocity …’ (p. 358). Compared to this ambiguous representation,
in Clermont Madeline finds the D’Alemberts merely repugnant, and
although finally repentant by the end of the novel, the father is no better
than the son.

Northanger Abbey also
contains villains, but they are deployed in far from Gothic terms.
Catherine experiences two Gothic encounters well before she goes to the
Abbey. The first instance occurs when she is due to meet the Tilneys
for a walk, and is ‘kidnapped’ by John Thorpe, who lies to her, stating
that Eleanor and Henry have broken their engagement with Catherine.
When she passes them on the street, and attempts to stop Thorpe, he ‘only
laughed, smacked his whip, made odd noises, and drove on; and Catherine,
angry and vexed as she was, having no power of getting away, was obliged
to give up the point and submit’ (p. 78). Austen ironically contrasts
the fear of kidnapped Gothic heroines when they are taken to the Gothic
ruin with the fact that such an event is Catherine’s only consolation: ‘Blaize
castle remained her only comfort; towards that, she still looked
at intervals with pleasure …’ (p. 79). The deflationary tone of this
passage is established by the fact that Blaize Castle was a modern folly
built in 1766 (in the vein of Walpole’s Strawberry Hill), something that
many contemporary readers would have known. The irony is perpetuated
when the trip is cancelled because of the late hour of departure and the
nature of the ‘villain’, who is nothing more than a boorish youth.
The second instance is less parodic, and more threatening, when Catherine’s
arrangements are thwarted by Thorpe, and her attempt to make amends is physically
interrupted by the Thorpes and her brother: ‘Isabella, however, caught hold
of one hand; Thorpe of the other; and remonstrances poured in from all three.
Even James was quite angry’ (p. 90). Her response echoes Emily’s desire
for ‘fortitude’ in the face of Montoni: ‘Away walked Catherine in great
agitation, as fast as the crowd would permit her, fearful of being pursued,
yet determined to persevere’. This serious tone is not sustained,
however, as once Catherine arrives at the Tilneys’ to explain, she finds
herself too much out of breath to speak at first.

Significantly, it is this event
which precipitates the suspicious behaviour of the major villain of the
novel, General Tilney:

To such anxious attention was the general’s civility carried,
that not aware of her extraordinary swiftness in entering the house, he
was quite angry with the servant who had reduced her to open the door of
the apartment herself. … And if Catherine had not warmly asserted his innocence,
it seemed likely that William would lose the favour of his master for ever,
if not his place, by her rapidity. (pp. 92–3)

Once at the Abbey, Catherine’s Gothic delusions obscure her
vision completely, and she explains the General’s irascible behaviour and
selfish decisions by constructing a fiction that he has murdered his wife.
From her first day at the Abbey, she commits herself to discover the secrets
that lurk within it, and once she begins to suspect the General, her imagination
is obsessed with the notion. On the one hand, her intuition leads
her to infer that the General is not all he would have her believe: ‘in
spite of their father’s great civilities to her … it has been a release
to get away from him. It puzzled her to account for all this’ (p.
115). On the other hand, her limited knowledge magnifies his evil
until in her eyes he becomes a Gothic villain:

It was the air and attitude of a Montoni!What could
more plainly speak the gloomy workings of a mind not wholly dead to every
sense of humanity, in its fearful review of past scenes of guilt?
Unhappy man! (p. 163)

However, when she reveals her suspicions to Henry, it is not
long before he disabuses her of such idle speculations:  Dear
Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained.
What have you been judging from? … what ideas have you been admitting? 
(p. 172). Catherine accepts this disenchantment wholeheartedly, and
the general is ‘cleared from the grossly injurious suspicions which she
must ever blush to have entertained, [although] she did believe [him], upon
serious consideration, to be not perfectly amiable’ (p. 174).

This commonsense attitude is
scrutinised, however, when the General expels Catherine mysteriously and
shamefully from Northanger Abbey: ‘Turned away from the house, and in such
a way!without any reason that could justify, any apology that could
atone for the abruptness, the rudeness, nay, the insolence of it’ (p. 197).
When Henry reveals to Catherine that the General had been promoting a union
between the pair because he believed her to be an heiress, and then expelled
her upon discovering she was not, she concludes, ‘in suspecting General
Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned
against his character, or magnified his cruelty’ (p. 215). Catherine
is able to realise that she did not mistake the General’s character, just
how it would be exhibited in his behaviour. The difference between
the Gothic villain and the General is not based on the evil within, but
(as Henry attempts to make clear) in the manner in which that evil is realised.
Austen’s villains are a disruptive influence in her world, yet they are
not subversive ones: the General does not have the sexual charisma or sexual
energy of a Montoni; rather, he is an ill-tempered observer of forms whose
fundamental evil is a sense of his own superiority. As George Levine
notes, ‘what is monstrous about him is only social greed and banality’.[8]

While Austen’s novel demonstrates
that there is real malice present in the General, unlike Udolpho
the text suggests that the threat he poses is not the loss of her life or
chastity, but of her dignity and happiness. Even the seven-hour journey
she faces alone is never presented as dangerous or alarming, rather as uncivilised.
The General’s villainy rests on his adherence to the surfaces of supposedly
proper behaviour, while it in actual fact transgresses the conventions of
common decency. His mercenary attitude matches that of the avaricious
Gothic bandit, Montoni; yet compared to the latter’s control over the heroine
and his inherent power, the General is depicted as comically prosaic.
Austen is aware of the fact that eighteenth-century England is not a world
which allows for the monochrome villains of the Gothic milieu, and
to seek them is to ignore the fundamental evils which are perpetuated by
people, like the Thorpes, and Captain Tilney, as well as his father.
Tara Ghoshal Wallace draws an excellent contrast between Catherine’s Gothicising
of the villain and the reality of his evil:

the General remains a puzzle. His aggressive courtship
of Catherine is as much a mystery to us as it is to his children.
While Catherine, baffled by his inconsistencies, looks for an explanation
for his darker side, we try to uncover a motive for his kindness to her.[9]

The issue that Wallace raises here is that, unlike sentimental
fiction, Catherine and the narrative impulse of Northanger Abbey
move in opposite directions when analysing the nature of evil in the Austenian
world; despite this, however, both ultimately arrive at the same conclusion.

A dire and threatening place, it remains more than a dwelling.
It starts out as a stone representation of the dark, tortured windings of
the eminently civilized, and therefore ‘unnatural’ vices, ambition and cruelty
…[10]

In Gothic fiction, the ruin represents the antithesis to the
Augustan ideal: the triumph of chaos over order, of imagination over rationalism,
of nature over man. These paradigmatic aspects establish the ruin
as the definitive symbol for the Romantics’ acknowledgement of the insignificance
of humanity. The approach to the Gothic ruin generally occurs through
its lowest point so that the most picturesque, and therefore sublime, view
of it can be apprehended.[11] In Clermont, there are two Gothic
castles within which Madeline faces the terrors of the D’Alemberts: the
Chateaux de Merville and Montmorenci. Her initial view of the first
is representative of the genre:

Behind the chateau lay its old fashioned gardens … and above
them, bounding the horizon, were seen the towering Alps, those gigantic
sons of creation … The vast magnitude and decaying grandeur of the chateau,
impressed Madeline with surprise and melancholy; which were almost heightened
to awe and veneration on entering a gloomy-vaulted hall of immense size
… (pp. 38–9)

After the death of the Countess, and the arrival of her daughter
and son-in-law, Madeline is led by Madame D’Alembert to hide from her lecherous
husband, first in the room where her benefactress died, and then in the
vaults which connect to the castle: ‘she felt chilled, she felt oppressed
beyond expression, as she viewed the records of mortality …’ (p. 188).
It is not long before her life is threatened by a mysterious stranger, ‘drawing
a small dagger from his breast with which he … approached Madeline’ (p.
190). Similarly terrifying phenomena occur in the Chateau de Montmorenci,
which is even more decaying than its predecessor: Madeline sees ghostly
hands, hears noises, and is threatened by the elder D’Alembert on a number
of occasions. As Mark Madoff notes,

Inside and outside is the Gothic dimension; inside and outside
is the line along which the protagonists move, between experience and innocence,
between danger and security, … between anarchy and civilization, between
license and repression.[12]

The Gothic ruin represents the exaggeration of the villain’s
evil to which the heroine is forced to submit, yet also encouraged to defy.
It is a place of testing, whereby the sentimental virtues are investigated,
tempered with knowledge, and finally reinstated. Essentially, the
ruin embodies a transition, a process in which these characteristics encounter
the Sublime and combine with it to manifest ultimately in the paradigmatic
heroism of the sentimental protagonist.

Catherine’s obsession with Gothic
castles and her anticlimactic experience of them is first exhibited in her
abortive ‘abduction’ by John Thorpe to Blaize Castle. Austen is preparing
the reader for the centrepiece of the novelNorthanger Abbey itself.
On the way to the Abbey, Henry presents Catherine with a ‘Gothic story’
about what she can expect upon her arrival:  Are you prepared
to encounter all the horrors that building such as ‘what one reads about’
may produce?Have you a stout heart?Nerves fit for sliding panels
and tapestry?  (p. 138). Henry intersperses details
from various Radcliffean romances, whilst including real details of what
does exist in the housethe chest and the japanned closetso that
when Catherine does arrive she confuses reality with fiction. Austen
deflates the Gothic potential of the Abbey as soon as it appears:

To pass between lodges of a modern appearance, to find herself
with such ease in the very precincts of the abbey, and driven so rapidly
along a smooth, level road of fine gravel, without obstacle, alarm, or solemnity
of any kind, struck her as odd and inconsistent. (p. 141)

When she finally arrives, Catherine’s initial feelings leave
her disappointed, because she enters ‘without feeling one aweful foreboding
of future misery to herself, or one moment’s suspicion of any past scenes
of horror being acted within the solemn edifice’. Austen’s ironic
comparison between the reality of the Abbey and her heroine’s Gothic dreams
continues the deflationary impulse of Northanger Abbey:

An abbey!yes, it
was delightful to be really in an abbey!but she doubted, as she looked
round the room, whether any thing within her observation, would have given
her the consciousness. The furniture was in all the profusion and
elegance of modern taste. … The windows, to which she looked with peculiar
dependence, from having heard the General talk of his preserving them in
their Gothic form with reverential care, were yet less what her fancy had
portrayed. To be sure, the pointed arch was preservedthe form
of them was Gothicthey might be even casementsbut every pane
was so large, so clear, so light! To an imagination which had hoped
for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for painted glass,
dirt and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing. (pp. 141–2)

Despite such ironic inversions, and although Catherine tells
Henry, ‘[t]his is just like a book!But it cannot really happen to
me’ (p. 139), when she discovers the mysterious chest in her room, her words
typically echo those of the Gothic heroine: ‘I will look into itcost
me what it may, I will look into itand directly tooby day-light
.If I stay till evening my candle may go out’ (p. 143). What
she finds within is a ‘white cotton counterpane’, and Austen points out
the absurdity of such delusions, when Eleanor arrives at her door: ‘the
rising shame of having harboured for some minutes an absurd expectation,
[to] which was then added the shame of being caught in so idle a search’
(p. 144). However, Catherine’s perceptions remain obscured by her
reading: later the same day, she searches through a promising closet, and
finds ‘a roll of paper pushed back into the further part of the cavity,
apparently for concealment …’ (p. 148). Austen’s dismantling of Gothic
apparatus reaches its climax when the papers disclose their secret: ‘Could
it be possible, or did not her sense play her false?An inventory of
linen, in coarse and modern characters, seemed all that was before her!’
(p. 150). Unable to find any secrets in the Abbey, Catherine transfers
her Gothic fantasies onto the General, until all her romantic indulgences
are shown to be false by Henry’s famous remonstrance about her perceptions.
The Abbey is not what Catherine has made it, and each moment of surrender
to ordinary reality is followed by a resolution not to make the same errors
of imagination again, but each resolution is then followed by an application
of the same error. She finds the chest, then the cabinet, then the
laundry bill, and finally the General. The heroine cannot locate the
true meaning of evil for herself, as is manifest by her uncomprehending
response to her expulsion. Whereas the Gothic ruin interrogates the
values of sensibility and the progress to a world tempered with knowledge,
Austen’s thoroughly modern Abbey represents the deflation of the false aesthetic
attitudes Catherine has adopted from her reading, from Isabella, and even
from Henry. As Darrel Mansell notes, ‘It is the Udolpho that Jane
Austen is going to destroy with commonplace facts’.[13] The romanticised
Abbey is, ironically, a place where romantic ideas are banished for the
quotidian realities of the world, and where the Gothic delusion about the
General’s behaviour must be replaced with tangible fact of his evil, which
is essentially the same, even if manifests itself in an entirely un-Gothic
manner.

INTERPRETING
RADCLIFFEJane Austen and Regina Maria Roche exemplify two contradictory
aspects which form a fundamental part of Radcliffean Gothic. While
Radcliffe’s fictions celebrate the imaginative power of the heroine, they
also militate against the sensibility which underpins it. Emily St
Aubert’s experiences lead her to realise that, however admirable sentimental
virtues might be, a perception grounded in feeling is an essentially problematised
one. Roche, on the other hand, uniformly adopts those tropes of Radcliffe’s
fiction which validate the prescience of sentimentalism without question.
While some of its excesses are brought into relief, sensibility is never
as fully interrogated in Clermont as it is in The Mysteries of
Udolpho. Roche’s Gothicism ultimately resolves itself as a distillation,
and simplification, of her predecessor’s texts: while Roche’s heroines might
be braver and more resilient than Radcliffe’s, they are less self-aware.
Hence, Roche’s role in the Radcliffean paradigm may be perceived as a retroactive
one, returning to the more unilateral forms of the earlier Gothic writers.
Austen, on the other hand, develops the critical aspects of Radcliffe’s
Gothicism, emphasising the absurdity of attempts to relate romance to reality.
Austen’s progression from Radcliffe is evident in the fact that, while Radcliffe
disturbs eighteenth-century theories of sensibility, Austen herself challenges
the particular texts which exemplify such notionsin this case, Radcliffe’s
own Mysteries of Udolpho. It is, then, from this understanding,
that one can begin to place Austen identifiably within the terms of an antecedent
Radcliffean tradition.

NOTES

Q.v., Northanger Abbey, ed. Marilyn Butler (1818; London: Penguin,
1995), p. 37: ‘I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my
pocketbook. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer
of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries’.
Subsequent references to the text are taken from this edition, and will be
included in parentheses in the essay.
For interesting commentaries on the ‘horrid
novels’, q.v., Michael Sadleir, ‘The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane
Austen’, The English Association Pamphlet 69 (1927), 1–23; and Bette
B. Roberts, ‘The Horrid Novels: The Mysteries of Udolpho and Northanger
Abbey ’, Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth
W. Graham (New York: AMS Press, 1989; Ars Poetica Series 5), pp. 89–111.
See also section III of this essay.

‘Introduction’ to Regina Maria Roche, Clermont: A Tale in Four Volumes,
ed. Devendra P. Varma (1798; London: Folio Press, 1968; The Northanger Set
of Jane Austen Horrid Novels), p. vii. Subsequent references to the
text are taken from this edition, and will be included in parentheses in the
essay. For more information on Roche’s writings, q.v., Natalie Schroeder,
‘Regina Maria Roche, Popular Novelist, 1789–1834: The Rochean Canon’, Papers
of the Bibliographical Society of America 73 (1979), 462–8: ‘Regina Maria
Roche is one of the major luminaries of the generation of Charlotte Smith
and Ann Radcliffe. By the critical establishment of the 1790s, such
as it was, she was not as much admired as the authors of Emmeline and
The Romance of the Forest, but her readers were legion’ (p. 462).
See also section II of this essay.

Q.v., Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée
(1794; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 342: consider, for
instance, when Emily chastises herself ‘for suffering her romantic imagination
to carry her so far beyond the bounds of probability, and determined to endeavour
to check its rapid flights, lest they should sometimes extend into madness’.
Subsequent references to the text are taken from this edition, and will be
included in parentheses in the essay.

Natalie Schroeder, ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho and Clermont:
The Radcliffean Encroachment on the Art of Regina Maria Roche’, Studies
in the Novel 12 (1980), 137.

Below is a chronological listing of the fiction published
by Regina Maria Roche during her career as a novelist, including a list
of ‘doubtful and suppositious works’. Each entry lists the full title,
year of publication, publisher, and information regarding holdings listed
in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogues
[ESTC/NSTC]. The presence of copies in the Corvey Microfiche Edition
(CME) is also indicated when possible. The letters BI before a list
of holding libraries denotes that they are to be found in Britain and Ireland,
and similarly the letters NA denote libraries in North America. For
the purpose of consistency the abbreviations for holding libraries are the
same as those used in the ESTC, even when the source of the holding is the
NSTC. Where the edition which provides the entry does not appear in
the ESTC or NSTC, this will be denoted by a preceding ‘x’ (e.g. xESTC).

The Vicar of Lansdowne; or, Country Quarters. A Tale.
By Maria Regina [sic] Dalton. In Two Volumes. (Printed for
the Author: and Sold by J. Johnson, 1789). 2 vols. 12mo.
ESTC t071894 (BI L, NA OU, ViU).
* Further edns: London 1800, Baltimore 1802, New York 1802, London 1825;
French trans. 1789, German trans. 1790.

The Maid of the Hamlet. A Tale. By Regina Maria Roche,
Author of The Vicar of Landsdown. (London: Printed for H. Long, [1793]).
2 vols. 12mo.
xESTC [1st edn. not located].
* Further edns: London 1800, Boston 1801, Dublin 1802, London 1821, 1833;
French trans. 1801.

The Children of the Abbey, a Tale. In Four Volumes.
By Regina Maria Roche. (London: Printed for William Lane, at the Minerva-Press,
1796). 4 vols. 12mo.
ESTC t119309 (BI C, L; NA ViU).
* Further edns: Philadelphia 1796, London 1797, 1798, Cork 1798,
London 1800, Philadelphia 1801, London 1805, New York 1805, Philadelphia
1812, New York 1816, Philadelphia 1816, Belfast, 1826, Glasgow 1826, London
1836; French trans. 1797, German trans. 1803.

Nocturnal Visit. A Tale. In Four Volumes. By Maria
Regina [sic] Roche, Author of The Children of the Abbey, Maid of
the Hamlet, Vicar of Lansdowne, and Clermont. (London: Printed
at the Minerva-Press, for William Lane, 1800). 4 vols. 12mo.
Corvey (CME 3-628-48463-4); ESTC t127131 (BI L; NA CaAEU, IU).
* Further edns: Philadelphia 1801; French trans. 1801, German trans. 1802.

The Discarded Son; or, Haunt of the Banditti. A Tale.
In Five Volumes. By Regina Maria Roche, Author of The Children of the
Abbey, &c. (London: Printed at the Minerva-Press, for Lane, Newman,
and Co., 1807). 5 vols. 12mo.
Corvey (CME 3-628-48458-8); NSTC R1415 (BI C, L).
* Further edns: New York 1807, London 1825; French trans. 1808.

The Houses of Osma and Almeria; or, Convent of St.
Ildefonso. A Tale. In Three Volumes. By Regina Maria Roche, Author of
The Children of the Abbey, Discarded Son, &c. (London: Printed
at the Minerva Press, for A. K. Newman and Co., 1810). 3 vols. 12mo.
Corvey (CME 3-628-48462-6); NSTC D147 (BI L).
* Further edn: Philadelphia 1810.

The Monastery of St. Columb; or, the Atonement. A Novel.
In Five Volumes. By Regina Maria Roche, Author of The Children of the
Abbey; Houses of Osma and Almeria; Discarded Son, &c. (London:
Printed at the Minerva-Press, for A. K. Newman and Co., 1813). 5 vols.
12mo.
Corvey (CME 3-628-48460-X); NSTC D149.5 (BI L).
* Further edns: New York and Philadelphia 1813; German trans. 1816, French
trans. 1819.

Trecothick Bower; or, the Lady of the West Country.
A Tale. In Three Volumes. By Regina Maria Roche, Author of The Children
of the Abbey; Discarded Son; Houses of Osma and Almeria; Monastery of
St. Columb; Vicar of Lansdowne, &c. &c. (London: Printed at
the Minerva-Press, for A. K. Newman and Co., 1814). 3 vols. 12mo.
Corvey (CME 3-628-48465-0); NSTC D151 (BI L, O).
* Further edn: Philadelphia and Boston 1816.

The Munster Cottage Boy. A Tale. In Four Volumes. By
Regina Maria Roche, Author of The Children of the Abbey, Trecothick Bower,
Monastery of St. Columb, &c. &c. (London: Printed at the Minerva-Press
for A. K. Newman and Co., 1820). 4 vols. 12mo.
Corvey (CME 3-628-48461-8); NSTC 2D1379 (BI L, O).
* Further edns: New York 1820; French trans. 1821.

Bridal of Dunamore; and Lost and Won. Two Tales. By
Regina Maria Roche, Author of The Children of the Abbey, Trecothick Bower,
Maid of the Hamlet, Munster Cottage Boy, Vicar of Lansdown, Houses of
Osma and Almeria, &c. In Three Volumes. (London: Printed for A.
K. Newman and Co., 1823). 3 vols. 12mo.
Corvey (CME 3-628-48428-6); NSTC 2R14777 (BI C, L, O).
* Further edn: French trans. 1824.

The Tradition of the Castle; or, Scenes in the Emerald
Isle. In Four Volumes. By Regina Maria Roche, Author of The Children of
the Abbey, Vicar of Lansdown, Maid of the Hamlet, &c. (London:
Printed for A. K. Newman and Co., 1824). 4 vols. 12mo.
Corvey (CME 3-628-48464-2); NSTC 2D1381 (BI L, O).
* Further edn: French trans. 1824.

DOUBTFUL AND
SUPPOSITIOUS WORKS
The works listed below have at one time been attributed to, or associated
with, Regina Maria Roche. The evidence available at present indicates
that these titles are likely not to be by Roche herself, and that the ‘Mrs
Roche’ referred to in entries 2 to 4 is either another author or a fictional
device invented by their publishers, with the intent of capitalising on
the fame of Regina Maria Roche. This seems especially the case since
works accepted to be written by Regina Maria Roche were printed only at
the Minerva Press, following her success with The Children of the Abbey
in 1796. These last three suppositious works, published within the
limited timespan of 1814–15, seem to have no links with the Minerva whatsoever,
despite the fact that Roche continued her association with A. K. Newman
until 1836. As well as the seven-year gap between 1800 and 1807, there
seem to be, however, no works published under her (full) name from 1815
to 1819, by either Minerva or any other publisherat present this hiatus
is unaccounted for. For a fuller examination of the status of these
titles, see Natalie Schroeder, ‘Regina Maria Roche, Popular Novelist, 1789–1834:
The Rochean Canon’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
73 (1979), 462–8.

Alvondown Vicarage. A Novel. In Two Volumes. (London:
Printed at the Minerva-Press, for Lane, Newman, and Co., 1807). 2 vols.
12mo.
Corvey (CME 3-628-47051-X); NSTC R1414 (BI O).
* This title had been widely catalogued as by Roche, although not in the
English Catalogue of Books; another unusual fact which leaves the
issue of authorship open to question is that the usual formula of title-chains
is omitted here.

London Tales; or, Reflective Portraits. (London:
Printed for John Booth, 1814). 2 vols. 12mo.
Corvey (CME 3-628-51094-5); NSTC D148 (BI L).
* The copy held in the British Library has the name ‘Mrs. Roche’ inscribed
on the title-page. Schroeder notes, ‘the style is spare and unliterary
in character, and (except on the title page) there is no use of mottoes
or intercalated poetry, which, since The Children of the Abbey,
Mrs. Roche had regularly employed to give her work a genteel atmosphere’
(pp. 466–7).

Plain Tales. By Mrs. Roche, Author of The Moor,
&c. In Two Volumes. (London: Published and Sold by G. Walker […]
Sold also by Cradock and Joy, 1814). 2 vols. 12mo.
xNSTC [copy located in Bristol University’s Early Novels Collection].
* The Moor has so far not been located.

This section contains details of the ‘horrid novels’ mentioned by Isabella
Thorpe in Northanger Abbey. The structure of the entries is
identical to that of section II, with the exception that author’s names
have also been included with the entries; brackets are used to enclose the
names of authors who published anonymously or those parts of names not included
on title-pages.

[KAHLERT, Carl Friedrich]; translated by TEUTHOLD, Peter.The Necromancer: or the Tale of the Black Forest: Founded on Facts.
Translated from the German of Lawrence Flammenberg, by Peter Teuthold.
In Two Volumes. (London: Printed for William Lane, at the Minerva-Press,
1794). 2 vols. 12mo.
ESTC t014934 (BI L; NA CLU-S/C, ICN, ViU etc.)
* Trans. of Der Geisterbanner (1792). Further edn: Dublin 1795.

PARSONS, [Eliza].Castle of Wolfenbach; a German Story. In Two Volumes. By Mrs. Parsons,
Author of Errors of Education, Miss Meredith, Woman as She Should Be,
and Intrigues of a Morning. (London: Printed for William Lane, at
the Minerva Press […] and Sold by E. Harlow, 1793). 2 vols. 12mo.
ESTC t185360 (BI O; NA IU, ViU).
* Further edns: London 1794, 1824, 1835, 1839, 1854.

SLEATH, [Eleanor].The Orphan of the Rhine. A Romance, in Four Volumes. By Mrs. Sleath.
(London: Printed at the Minerva-Press, for William Lane, 1798). 4 vols.
12mo.
xESTC [Library of Congress online gateway <http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/gateway.html>
indicates copies of 1st edn. located in Yale and Virginia Universities
(Sadleir-Black Collection of Gothic Novels) Universities].

CONTRIBUTOR
DETAILS
Anthony Mandal (BA Dunelm, MA Wales) is a PhD student at Cardiff University,
examining the literary and publishing world faced by Jane Austen in the 1810s.
His thesis seeks to consider a number of pertinent questions: What were
contemporary novelists writing? How easy was it for a woman writing
in the nineteenth century? How successful was Austen compared to her peers?
How astute was she, entering the literary marketplace at a time when female
authors were at their most prolific? Answering these questions might
lead to Austen being considered, not as an isolated author, but as one who
was very much a part of the publishing world of the early nineteenth century.
Published contributions include entries in the
forthcoming Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (3rd edn.),
and New Dictionary of National Biography, as well as articles (including
one on Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho) in Fitzroy-Dearborn’s Encyclopedia
of the Novel (1999). Other main interests include information technology
and the Internet, and how these advances can be combined with traditional
scholarly skills to produce dynamic tools for researchers.